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besht03
Reviews
Hostel (2005)
Flaccid comic-strip riff
With all the emotional plausibility and depth of a Bazooka cartoon strip, this "high concept" bad-Playboy-fantasy-gone-bad riff is already more inert than its more unfortunate leads before it inexplicably morphs into, of all things, an escape movie. Unfotunately, Hostel turns out to be the kind of escape movie where a time-traveling Captain Kirk must break out of a Nazi fortress populated by hapless extras, existing solely to walk around menacingly and get clomped on the head. A crashing disappointment for Eli Roth after Cabin Fever, the only horrifying thing here is the planned sequel. Yeah, yeah, there are one or two comic touches involving a half-funny twist on the Oliver Dickens youthful vagabond shtick, and there's the inevitable revenge on the bad-guys; but by the time Hostel staggers to its paint-by-number payoffs it's all too late.
Sorum (2001)
heartbreaking study of love's fragility
As unlikely as it may seem for a thriller/horror flick, Sorum is a heartbreaking study of love's fragility, set in a crumbling tenement with a dark past in room 504, into which moves the protagonist, a 30-ish orphan taxi-cab driver, still seeking the maternal affection only haltingly admitted in his transient life. He meets a troubled neighbor, an externally tough, but vulnerable worker at a nearby 7-11, and bonds with her by helping dispose of the abusive husband who dies during one of his daily bouts of beating. This shared secret, however, is not the only secret uniting the two lovers and the other tenants of the apartments, inescapably implicated in the unfolding of the barely concealed tragedies that lie at the broken but eerily (if cruelly and perversely) nurturing heart of 504. Incisive psychologically knowing acting, supernatural forebodings, and a progressively tension building mystery are economically and seamlessly integrated in a profoundly affective portrait of the redemptive potential and ghostly possibility of abyss attending our attempts to break into family intimacy.
Shiryô no wana 2: Hideki (1992)
whazzup? they don't know either
The crew who made this film of a murderous love triangle set in a wasteland of urban Japanese anomie (revolving around an overweight movie projectionist, her spiffy TV- correspondent friend, and the man they both share, more or less) needed to decide what the heck was happening here before they went ahead into production. Sure, maybe the result would have been no less weirded out and non-linear than the mishmash fema-slasher-post-abortion-psycho-angst-fest they ended up with--but they would have made conscious decisions about how the weirdness did or did not fit together as a plot. Deliberately chosen incoherence might have jelled into a more compelling and less aimless flick. Personally, I enjoyed the film's unconventional post-Bergman moodiness: but the evident lack of storyboarded logic emphasizes budget and production shorftalls, dragging down the project.